Cutting's Edge contains nearly random Project Management insights from author and speaker Thomas Cutting, PMP. This is the place to go for lessons learned and real world practicality delivered with a twist of humor. Thomas has spoken at PMI and PSQT Conferences and is a regular contributor to ProjectManagementLearningCenter.com. Links to his Computerworld and InformIT.com articles appear under the "See Also..." section below. For booking information contact him at Thomas@CuttingsEdge.com.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

While on vacation I am pulling together a chunk of my blog entries to publish in book format entitled Project Management RX: 101 Daily Doses. This hasn’t left me much time to sit down and write anything new, but I did have a couple of random thoughts to pass on to you.Red, Yellow, Green. The often used RYG symbols indicating project status risk levels have proven very useful. But what if you were sitting at a stop light and the color never changed? It can be very frustrating. Sometimes I am tempted to jump out of my car and press the crosswalk button to make it change. For your project, anything other than Green should be temporary, too. Items causing your project to be Yellow should be resolved within 2 weeks. For Red issues, fast action should be taken to back it down to Yellow within 2-4 days.

Intolerable. While mentoring projects managers I occasionally hear the statement, “I guess we just have to live with it.” We cave in on many issues and inconveniences, including poor performers, additional scope, old resources, impossible time lines, or slow responses from other department. We feel like there is nothing we can do to stop it. Instead of whining about it, here’s a suggestion. Document the items as change requests and present them to the sponsor and PMO. Explain the impact to the project and receive their buy in stating that they are okay with it. When they see it in black and white it will be harder to ignore, forcing some action to be taken. If you put up with it, nothing will ever change.

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At the @task User Conference, the presenters were discussing how the red, yellow, and green status indicators really didn't present the real story of what's going on. Why is it yellow or red? They presented an interesting new platform called @task Stream that allows project managers and team members to add conversational data to the status indicator. You can see what I'm talking about by clicking on this link: social project management. The whole idea of using social networking concepts in project management is very intriguing.

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Thomas Cutting's mission is to raise your expectations of project management through supporting your company's efforts to:
• Establish an Enterprise PMO
• Assess and Increase Process Maturity
• Develop Effective Processes
• Deliver Projects successfully
He is currently doing this for C3G (www.C3G.com).
Prior experiences found him in the entertainment, retail, health insurance, banking, healthcare and automotive verticals. Managing, training, mentoring and working in this diverse background provides him with the basis for his writing and speaking engagements...
For more information or to contact him, visit www.CuttingsEdge.com.